


ille me osculat (the scenic byway remix)

by crookedspoon



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Boys Kissing, M/M, OT5, POV Richard Gansey III, Pining, Remix
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-11
Updated: 2017-09-11
Packaged: 2018-12-26 09:45:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,272
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12056358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crookedspoon/pseuds/crookedspoon
Summary: "gansey stands apart from the connection the other four share, because he doesn't know how to ask the others for that and the others don't think he wants like they do."noah is the one who sees."—weesaw,(i want you to know that i want to)





	ille me osculat (the scenic byway remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [weesaw](https://archiveofourown.org/users/weesaw/gifts).
  * Inspired by [(i want you to know that i want to)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3173768) by [weesaw](https://archiveofourown.org/users/weesaw/pseuds/weesaw). 



> weesaw, I very much adore with what you have done with so few words. If I could have, I wanted to be boring and write a scene for _all_ the snippets (among other ideas), but I'm a snail of a writer and this is all I could do in the time available. If WIPs were allowed in this challenge, I probably would have written 3-5 more chapters in the coming weeks.

It's not like Gansey doesn't notice something is going on, without him, apart from him. He does. He is not blind to the gazes lingering when they think he's not looking, to the words hovering in the air as sudden silence falls when he enters the room, or to the fingers resting on bare arms just a moment too long for comfort – his comfort, that is.

A seed of betrayal has lodged in his chest, stretching it tight like a drumhead over a hollow shell, and slowly growing to crush the breath from his lungs.

He is hunched over his desk, back curving with the lack of sleep. Ronan is out again at an hour too unholy to invite anything but trouble, and Gansey's stomach is twisted with worry. He'd hoped that at least, with everything going on around him – with Ronan and the others – he'd hoped that Ronan would find some of his needs met, so that he wouldn't go chasing danger like an unleashed bloodhound anymore.

Though that is not all he is worried about. His pen is poised over his journal but not marking anything, his head crowded with thoughts that have nothing to do with Glendower, his heart clenching with unnamed wants.

Not for the first time, a sense of loss threatens to wash over him. Here he has finally found a group of friends he could be certain was not seeking out his company for his name or his parents' money, but instead for a search that was bringing them ever closer to a mystical king buried in the mountains of Henrietta. A naive part of him had hoped the exchange of ideas and the thrill of discovery would be enough to sustain them, to keep them in his orbit, yet his gravitational field, or that of their quest, seems not to be strong enough to hold them, because they're sneaking around him now, maybe even turning away from him.

When they look at him, their eyes are apologetic, wary, stoic, all a variation of _not you, Gansey,_ and his desire to know, to be included again, sits in his throat like a dagger; the hand he wants to lift to reach out hangs trembling and useless by his side.

Is it because he is a coward, because he fears rejection, because some part of him believes they do not want him to share in this?

His thumb brushes over his bottom lip, and it sparks a fire only someone else's lips can douse. He presses his teeth down in a vain effort to quell the feeling.

His focus returns to the pen he's been tapping pensively on the page. There will be no new epiphanies tonight.

Perhaps he should be working on his model of Henrietta instead. That, at least, requires no complex thought or power of deduction. It might even clear his mind a little.

He startles when he turns in his chair. Noah is standing in front of him; as usual, there's no telling if he had been there all along or if he'd just appeared out of—wherever it is Noah goes to when he is not around to be seen.

All at once, Gansey's heart aches. He cannot look at Noah without remembering Ronan's smoldering gaze, Blue's light blush, Adam's averted eyes, even Noah's own cheeky grin, as alive then as any of them, all telling a story whose content is barred to Gansey.

"You look like you're worrying yourself into a heart attack," Noah says, without preamble, as he often does, and pokes the space between Gansey's eyebrows. "He's okay, you know."

Gansey tries to smooth his features. "Ronan?" He hadn't noticed how worried he'd been until Noah brought it up.

"He's with Adam."

"I see," Gansey says, and his relief is warring with a plummeting sensation in the pit of his stomach, something that Gansey is not quite ready yet to characterize as jealousy.

"Does it bother you?" Noah asks, finger slowly tracing the arch of Gansey's brow. It is cool against the heat that is suffusing Gansey's face and draws his attention back to Noah.

He swallows. "What do you mean?"

"I'm sure you must have noticed by now. About Ronan and Adam. And Blue, and me?" His finger made his way into Gansey's hair, tracing the shell of his ear. Gansey's scalp catches fire like dry underbrush and his whole body shivers.

"It's..." For a moment, Gansey deliberates whether he ought to deny it. But there is nothing to be gained from that except a continuation of his current predicament. "It's hard to miss."

"So. _Does_ it bother you?"

Gansey shakes his head, because it doesn't, not really, not the fact of it in and of itself at least, and the gesture brushes his cheek against Noah's fingertips once more. Gansey's breath stills.

"We've been wondering."

"About?" Belatedly, Gansey realizes that Noah is looping back to his previous question instead of introducing a new one.

Noah shrugs lopsidedly. "Whether, I don't know, you'd want to—I mean, are you at all interested in this sort of thing?"

"What 'sort of thing' are you referring to?" Gansey could feel his cheeks heat as he's desperately trying to keep his mind from derailing. Surely, he doesn't mean _that._

"You know. Kissing, and stuff." Probably sensing that Gansey is about to have a mild seizure because the vagueness of his statement is open to interpretation, he adds, "But mostly kissing."

"Oh," Gansey says, and it comes out as a rush of breath. He would have thought he was transparent, every corrupt thought written across his face. "I... am not disinclined, if that's what you mean."

"So if I wanted to kiss you now, would you say yeah?" Noah's voice is a whisper.

Gansey's pulse picks up like rapid percussions. "You want to kiss me?"

"Don't you want to know what it's like?" Noah asks, and Gansey can feel himself tremble. He is about to say he knows what kissing is like, but then Noah unleashes what has been on Gansey's mind all this time. "Kissing the others?"

Gansey's breath is going shallow. He is sitting very still, unable to reply, because what if - to entertain the possibility - Noah is testing him, what if the offer is not really on the table? But Noah is not cruel, and Gansey's answer would be a resounding yes if he had a way of forming it. But his speech tract seems to be fritzed.

Something must have given him away, though, because Noah doesn't stop there.

"What it's like to kiss Blue? What little noises she makes when you kiss her, and how her fingers feel in your hair?" The fingers that have been playing with the hairs at Gansey's nape now ghost over his ear and comb into his hair. The prickling of his scalp explodes into a shiver down his spine. "How she's soft and small against you the moment before the kiss, but then she grows into it and suddenly _you_ feel small when she winds her arms around your shoulders."

Gansey can't listen to this. He is yearning for this so much it is physically painful. 

"Or Ronan?" Noah's hand settles on his shoulder. When Gansey looks up into Noah's light eyes, a sad smile casts a shadow on his face. "It started because of his nightmares, did you know that? No, I guess not. Sorry. I mean, he's terrified when he wakes from one, as you would be if you could do what he can – just imagine what that would be like – and anyway, it seems to help him calm down. You should feel the way his heart is galloping when he wakes all disoriented like that. It turns into something more of a quick trot when you kiss him for a while. It's amazing. And he wants so much, Gansey, you'd be swept up in it. He wants so much, but he never takes, even though he could, easily, given how strong he is."

"Noah—"

"Adam's different." Noah's touch is chilling through his shirt now, as though he's drawing more energy the more excited he gets. Or maybe it is the other way around: the more energy he draws, the more excited he can get, because that is closer to the way he was when he was alive. "I mean, he also doesn't push anything – it's like he's still overwhelmed anyone's kissing him at all – but he comes from a different place, and you can tell he wants to. It's in the way his breath comes in violent bursts against your cheek or the way his fingers curl into your sweater. He's solid and warm against you, and it feels like he's starving, so you want to give him everything."

Gansey makes a noise like a boiling teakettle. "Noah, stop please."

He knows he should have said it sooner, that he shouldn't have listened in the first place. These are his friends they're talking about and he shouldn't want to them in this way, shouldn't want to kiss them and be kissed back, shouldn't want their fingers in his hair or in his clothes, or rucking up his shirt to steal some touches of the skin underneath. 

Gansey is already feeling feverish by the time Noah finishes, but then he says something Gansey could never have prepared for:

"They all pretend I'm you, you know."

"What?" Gansey shakes his head. He doesn't believe that. They wouldn't use Noah like that. Not to mention that they wouldn't want Gansey like that.

"When they kiss me. It's not really me they're kissing." Noah gives another shrug. "It made Blue sad the first time, because, you know, of what she can't have with you."

Gansey's breath comes out ragged when he exhales. His chest twinges terribly. Noah's fingers are connected to the tightest and heaviest spot through his shirt, and his heart is drumming against them.

When Gansey looks up, Noah doesn't look sad about this, but he does look wistful.

"I'm not going to pretend," Gansey says, a lot braver than he feels, and his thumb skates along his bottom lip.

Noah's expression lights up like fireworks. "You wanna kiss me, too?"

"Isn't this what you're asking?" Gansey asks, suddenly hesitant. "Did I—did I misinterpret this?"

Grinning broadly, Noah twines his fingers around Gansey's hand and replaces Gansey's thumb with his lips.

For a long moment, while he waits for his world to turn, Gansey stops breathing. Noah is really kissing him. It's the ghost of a kiss, and cool, but growing colder and more solid as Noah sucks Gansey's energy from him. Gansey's pen drops to the floor, spattering a little ink between them.

It should be scary, or at least weird, kissing a dead boy like this, but a lot of strange things have happened throughout Gansey's life, and anyway, Noah is a friend, so he is safe. No, he is more than a friend: he is the reason Gansey is still alive to have these weird, fluttering feelings.

Gansey's wire-rimmed glasses fog up from his breath, and Noah's nose bumps against his, and Gansey's fingers curl around the sweater Noah is perpetually wearing. His skin is cold, but curiously, although the kiss is not as hot as it would have been with a living person, it is not as chilling and corpse-like as he might have expected. Or maybe it's because his own temperature is dropping so that Noah can feel real and solid against him.

Gansey is brimming with so much joy and hope, because if Noah breached the topic of him and the others kissing, then they're not trying to keep this from him.

When Noah pulls back, Gansey is shivering, unsure whether it's because of the cold seeping into his bones or because of how overwhelmed he is. He is used to searching for the tiniest clues for long periods of time and the avalanche of revelations that has swept over him these past minutes leaves him shaky on his feet.

"I've been waiting for this for a long time, you know," Noah says, and Gansey's heart melts because of the cheeky grin that's spreading over his face.

"So have I," Gansey says softly, fondly, stroking his thumb over the edge of Noah's lips. If he didn't know better, he wouldn't be able to believe this boy in front of him is a ghost. Then again, he didn't believe it at first, but not because Noah was appeared so solid as he does now. "Thank you."

Noah snorts, and his embarrassed shrug reaches Gansey's hand. "Don't thank me yet. This was only the beginning."

Gansey's heart thrills, alive with possibilities. "So how do we proceed from here?"

Noah grins wider. "Easy: you kiss the others. Except for Blue maybe, that could be dangerous for you, but Adam and Ronan don't have a curse on their lips as far as I know. Then again, I'm dead already, so it wouldn't affect me anyway."

Just like that, Gansey is burning like a furnace again, cheeks hot enough to rival the sun. "I can't just go around kissing my friends out of the blue."

Noah snickers, no doubt at the choice of words. "Why not? I'm sure they'd like it."

"Did they tell you that?" Gansey asks, cautiously.

"No, but I know these things."

"I don't mean any disrespect, but I rather trust hard evidence over intuition in these matters."

"I got it right with you, didn't I?"

Gansey's tongue ties itself in a knot in answer to that.

"Trust me," Noah says and kisses him again.

**Author's Note:**

> The Latin in the title means "he kisses me" and comes from Cicero's "Ille me amplexus atque oculans flere prohibebat" meaning "Hugging and kissing me, he prevented me from crying."


End file.
